Duel at Chalk Farm Tavern
On the night of Friday, February 16, 1821, two men faced each other across the field of honour, a wooded knoll beyond the Chalk Farm Tavern near Primrose Hill, to the north of a great chase that had yet to become Regent’s Park. This had been the scene of many duels; there were no neighbouring houses, just open fields ...
The Lays of Ancient Rome
On August 24, 79AD, Hell came to the Gulf of Naples. Vesuvius erupted and a searing pyroclastic cloud scorched, choked and buried the prosperous provincial Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum under thousands of tons of blistering ash and boiling mud. To the witnesses and victims it must have felt like the apocalypse.
A Very Popular Murder
Like his popular predecessors, ‘Jack the Ripper’ was not, therefore, simply a murderer, he was a hyper-real media event, and, apparently, he still is. So how did this lunatic become the Elvis of murder? The continuing obsession with Jack the Ripper is all about genre, setting, and the lack of a third act.
The Gothic Revival
It was the British, always out of step with their European neighbours, that laid the foundations of a cultural re-evaluation which would later spread to the continent ... the ‘Gothic polity’ therefore represented free institutions and was opposed to tyranny and privilege.
Resurrection, Corpse Art, and How the Father of Modern Surgery Stole the Irish Giant
Georgian surgery was not pretty. There was no real understanding of infection, and no anaesthetic. John Hunter called his patients ‘victims,’ and they were tied down and held as necessary, conscious and screaming throughout the procedure, which was often conducted in front of a large class of medical students.
The City’s Sacred Victim
The Ratcliffe Highway was an ancient road running east out of the City to Limehouse. Cutting its way through Tower Hamlets in the heart of the East End, the road had long held a bad reputation, being close to the old Execution Dock in Wapping where pirates were left hanging to rot – ‘a most dangerous quarter’ according to Thomas De Quincey.
The Real Harry Flashman
Sellon enlisted at sixteen and spent several years in India. There he developed a taste for prostitutes and the bored wives of officers and diplomats, thus embarking on a series of sexual adventures and at least one duel of which he wrote with wit and candour in his autobiography The Ups and Downs of Life, published posthumously in 1867.
Traveller in the Poor Man’s Country
On entering the precincts of the pest island, the air has literally the smell of a graveyard, and a feeling of nausea and heaviness comes over any one unaccustomed to imbibe the musty atmosphere...
London Labour and the London Poor
'It seems very wonderful indeed how all this world was done so quick. I should have thought that England alone would have took double the time, shouldn’t you sir?'
Houdini and Doyle: A Modern Ghost Story (Part One)
Celebrity friendships are strange beasts. Often, the unifying feature is the celebrity itself, which can bring otherwise very different people together, such as, you might think, the creator of Sherlock Holmes and ‘The Handcuff King’. These are strange bedfellows indeed, but for the fact that both were very high-profile commentators on Spiritualism. Conan Doyle was a true believer, Houdini was not...
Houdini and Doyle: A Modern Ghost Story (Part Two)
Houdini never tired of exposing mediums. So it was that when the Scientific American, capitalising on the interest in Conan Doyle’s lecture tours, offered a $2,500 prize to anyone who could produce under test conditions ‘an objective psychic manifestation of physical character’, Houdini was invited to sit on the investigating committee in what was almost certainly intended as a deliberate provocation of Conan Doyle...
We Happy Few’: Agincourt, History, and National Myth
Even though Agincourt did not play out the way Shakespeare wrote it, we might even argue that it is still true. Shakespeare’s Henry V, after all, wouldn’t be the first fictional character to change the world. It could all have been so different. It was not Henry's military acumen, God’s will, or the heroism of his men that carried the day. It was blind luck.